Geoffrey Purcell wrote: > > > Well, cooked meat doesn't contain vitamin C, unlike raw meats. Plus, cooking reduces the nutrients in raw meats, in a sliding scale where boiling meats annihilates the enzymes and bacteria along with some of the vitamins and minerals, while harsher cooking methods do much worse damage. > Personally, I'm not opposed to the idea that overcooked meats have less nutrients available. I just don't see why this then becomes a raw vs cooked argument, ie ALL cooking is bad. > > > Re Stefansson/Bellevue Experiment:- I generally wince every time Stefansson is mentioned as a supposed authority on diet. For one thing, many things he states or claims are contradicted by other anthropologists such as Weston-Price(eg:- re the issue of organ-meats), plus he was famously condemned as a fraud for his other theory re the so-called "Blond Eskimoes" in Greenland, at one point. > I don't think Stef is an authority on diet at all. He related his experience with the particular Inuit he spent time with - not ALL Inuit. Their diets naturally differed depending on where they lived. The ones he lived with (Mackenzie) did eat some organ meat, but not a ton. Other peoples in other areas ate more, or less, or had different attitudes about them. Anyway, I agree the man was hardly perfect (he was extremely arrogant). Doesn't discount his experience entirely though, does it? > > More to the point, Stefansson is actually described as eating at least some raw meats during his Belluevue experiment(namely raw marrow), and didn't always eat his meats well-done, but sometimes rare. And the experiment lasted only 1 lousy year, and, after a while wasn't even rigorously supervised. > So perhaps then even a little bit of raw/undercooked meat does the trick? Until we see a study comparing a cooked meat/fat diet to a raw meat/fat diet, we can't really say with any authority. Nor can we say that 'cooking' is the problem...perhaps rare, or even med-rare retains enough and/or keeps what it does contain bio-available. We simply don't have the data (or at least I don't, but if you do I would be really interested in seeing it). And does this apply to all flesh foods, or merely ruminants? What about fish? Poultry? etc etc. > > > As regards malnutrition, there are some raw vegans who don't even show b12-deficiency until many years later, as the body finds ways to conserve b12-levels from other sources etc. Point taken. Other deficiency diseases, such as scurvey, can show up rapidly, sometimes in a matter of weeks. Depends. (And yes, I know that scurvey was often cured with raw meat)